Masks
by phillydragonldy
Summary: One Shot. Chloe wore many masks. When people saw the real her, they fled.


Prompt from lynzie914:

_well people are tricky, you can't afford to show,  
anything risky, anything they don't know.  
the moment you try, well kiss it goodbye_

Chloe knew no one wanted truth. Facade. That was all anyone really wanted. There was nothing of truth in it.

She had acquired many masks by now. Some were dusty, not seeing much use these days, but they were still there, just waiting to be donned. Other masks were so well worn that she didn't even consciously think about slipping them on. They were in place before she even knew it, kind of like the old slippers next to her bed. She woke and slipped her feet in them on her way to coffee. She only noticed when they were absent.

For Clark she had many well-worn masks over the years. Friend, confidant, sidekick, rescuer, thrower of seemingly thousands of green rocks, Watchtower.

She cringed internally, even betrayer at times.

None were entirely real, because none were ever complete. She had dreamed of more than those limited roles for years. The few times she had let her mask slip, he ran.

And for Clark, running was fast.

So she joked her way around it, pretending it wasn't real, pretending it was panic, or meteor rocks, or bad Chinese food.

Never truth.

Because if she stood her ground, she would lose him. His eyes would go empty and he would give her platitudes and grand descriptions of what she meant to him, but then he would disappear.

At least Clark would accept her facade once she returned to it's comfortable fit.

Her father ran away and never returned. Not even for her wedding. She had let slip her mask of dutiful daughter in favor of justice.

She should have realized that justice was blind. Justice wouldn't see her safe. It couldn't see at all.

She had exchanged the semblance of normal life with her father and even the almost-sister friendship she had with Lana in favor of seeing Lionel Luthor put in jail.

That facade, a normal life as a loving daughter and friend, was blown away with the safehouse.

Her father never looked at her the same again. He tried, but that last year with her, his eyes were hard and empty in their tiny apartment. Her quest for justice ruined his life and he never forgave that part of her. She should have known better than to let him see how deep her passion ran. Maybe she should have remained Lionel's puppet instead of breaking free to balance the scales. Maybe then her father would have stayed, would have looked at her with something besides disappointment and even a little hate.

It was strange that the summer she was dead she was more real than at almost any other time in her life. She wasn't a prisoner exactly, but she wasn't free to leave either. Not if she wanted to live. She knew this and accepted it, feeling surprisingly free in her private world. No one to judge as she hunted for weird. No one to care that she ached for Clark. No one to look at her with disappointment.

Lex had gone to extraordinary efforts to find a place to keep her safe until the trial, but the cornerstone of that safety was the "fact" of her death.

Hmmm. Thinking back, maybe that was a facade too. One she donned more than once, sometimes even in truth.

Chloe Sullivan, dead girl.

Funny thing, not even her deaths were her own. Not even her deaths were true. They were taken from others. For others. The twisted joke of it was the ones she had taken it for didn't even know. Couldn't know. It had come too close to breaking her, and she couldn't be that vulnerable.

All of her facades were tough for good reason.

She found her head shaking as her mind ran on. Tough. She wished she really was that tough under it all. In actuality, she felt more like an old frying pan with the Teflon scraped off by improper care.

She had fooled herself into thinking that she had found someone who would treat her true battered self gently when she reconnected with Jimmy on Dark Thursday.

God, what a joke.

She had never been less real with anyone than she was with Jimmy. She built this fantasy of a normal life with him, as thin and delicate as wet rice paper. The fantasy had torn asunder time after time, bit she still grasped at the smaller and smaller shreds, stitching them together.

By the time she walked down the aisle, that fantasy was more like Frankenstein's monster than Happily Ever After.

Brainiac's infestation and then incomplete "cure" had left her mind broken.

She frantically pulled together a new mask, stitched from the parts she knew. It was a poor copy, but somehow no one noticed. No one wanted to notice.

Her memories and life felt shattered, fragmented. Holes she couldn't explain, leaving her adrift, reaching out for the only shelter in sight.

Jimmy.

But Jimmy was a poor lifeboat.

He drowned in his own trauma after another monster tore her world to shreds.

Jimmy's eyes filled with hate as he screamed at her. Empty of the love she thought he had for her.

It was a twisted joke.

Monsters and men, one inside the other.

Another person she was reaching towards, another hand she stretched out, hoping to connect.

Another mask.

Davis.

She still couldn't untangle the mess of emotions he stirred in her. She had turned too much of her mask inside out. It sparkled and reflected and refracted confusing images back at her like crystal with too many facets.

What was real and what were funhouse images?

In some ways she was more honest with him than with anyone else, but in others she lied to him as badly as she had with Jimmy.

With herself.

She raged about him whenever anyone mentioned him. It was expected. He had killed Jimmy, after all. Would have killed her too if Jimmy hadn't killed him in turn.

But she knew a mask when she saw it. On Davis and herself. The thing they had split from Doomsday may have had Davis' human form, but the soul was gone. Devoured by the monster from within. The thing they excised with the black kryptonite was a shell, a husk. Empty.

Davis was already dead. She knew it when he told his idealized story about Hades. She knew his fractured soul was trying to tell her he was already in Tartarus. She had gazed at him in crushing sorrow, disbelief, and horror. But she refused to believe, instead pulling on her most familiar of masks.

She made as joke of it.

But no one was laughing at the end.

Davis' hard and empty eyes as the shell of him attacked her. Those eyes going dull as he died, impaled on a pole where Jimmy had pushed him.

Then Oliver.

Oliver who threatened her over Brainiac's killing, Oliver who called her one of the bad guys, Oliver who murdered Lex.

Broken Oliver.

Damaged Oliver.

She thought he would understand, and for a while it seemed he did. It was a most unlikely of pairings on the surface. Billionaire and failed reporter, failed counselor, failed savior.

They helped each other heal.

After the deception of Jimmy and the intensity of Davis, Oliver was free and light and easy.

At least that was what she said.

Another facade slid into place.

She didn't know how or why, but it shifted. The facade was a poor one to start, never fitting quite right for either of them.

Oliver never did anything by half measures, so when he pushed for more, she gave in without enough protest.

She had wanted the first facade to fit, the one that said this was nothing serious, but it just didn't. The new one felt just as raw and uncomfortable, too intense. She felt like she could no longer hide. If she couldn't hide, he would leave her too. She was almost thankful it didn't last long.

When the opportunity came for her to revert to an old mask, she jumped on it eagerly.

Sacrifice.

She gave herself up easily, first to the Fate helmet, then to the Suicide Squad.

Everything with the Suicide Squad was hard, except wearing the mask.

She knew how to play tough. She was good at tough. She just put tough into the crucible until it was diamond.

But diamond suited her poorly upon return to the land of the living. She dusted off the face she had built for Oliver. It fit even more poorly now, but she owed it to him. He had waited. She would try.

Her capture and testing by Desaad seemed almost easy compared to that. She knew who she was, because she knew who she wasn't. She wasn't anyone the people she loved knew. It made it easy to turn his tricks aside. She was who she was by being who she wasn't.

Or something like that.

That made her magic fueled sort-of-wedding to Oliver a shock.

It seemed like bride in possession of all her faculties was not a mask she would ever get to wear.

Wife. Another re-worn mask. She wore it almost as badly the second time as she had the first.

She tried, but her true self was unsuited to the task. She couldn't be the supportive wife and foster-mother to Mia that Oliver seemed to want. She hated Star City. She resented Mia. She wanted to be back working with the heroes, not playing second-rate journalist. She had carved this life for him and she hated it.

She tried to break from the mold she had mistakenly created for herself, but it drove Oliver from her. She watched his eyes slowly empty when they fell on her as she tore at the facade of their life. She wasn't surprised when he finally left.

But then one day things changed again.

When he appeared - reappeared? - in her life she knew everything she had been was over.

She looked into that unmistakable gaze and whispered _"Is it really you?"_

No more masks. No more hiding. He saw right through them all to the person inside. He saw the person inside herself that she wasn't even sure she knew anymore, but he always would. Always had.

She just hadn't realized he saw until now.

She had thought those eyes gone from the world. Or at least gone from _her _world.

She had seen his empty eyes, but now she understood.

His eyes weren't empty now.

They saw the truth and they smiled.

Maybe it was time for her to see it too.


End file.
